DHS opposed war with Iran. Trump ignored those concerns. Now America is in danger.
In his first term, the president had his sights set on Iran, even though DHS officials warned that we needed more preparation. Trump has gone forward with a reckless war anyway.
In early 2022, at a hotel in Paris, Iranian operatives reportedly came within striking distance of assassinating former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Although the plot failed, it was part of a persistent, multi-year effort by the Islamic Republic of Iran to recruit hit teams overseas and on American soil to kill former U.S. officials. Their mission? Retaliation for the death of a top Iranian commander.
Now that United States is bombing Iran, we should expect far worse. But Donald Trump hasn’t made the homeland any safer. In fact, his hasty march to war has left us exposed.
The secondary consequences of striking Iran — especially the likely blowback on the U.S. homeland — were never fully accounted for by Donald Trump during his first term. I would know. When I was at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), we warned the White House that more “defensive” planning was needed before Trump launched offensive military action overseas. Those warnings were often ignored. Worse still, the White House started cutting DHS out of such conversations.
The motive for attempting to assassinate Pompeo was a ghost from the first Trump administration. Following a 2020 lethal U.S. strike against Qasem Soleimani (Iran’s top special forces commander), the country’s leaders vowed revenge. Experts on Iran know that the theocratic nation is a patient predator, willing to wait for the right moment to avenge past attacks, which is why the United States has always needed to plan its Iran strategy carefully.
But Trump was disinterested in the secondary and tertiary consequences of military action. Even when his own staff were notified by the FBI that they were in the crosshairs after the Soleimani killing, several of them shared with me they didn’t hear a word from the president. He knew their names were on Iranian kill lists. He didn’t care. In fact, when Trump came back into office last year, he revoked physical protection for Pompeo and others despite the mortal harm they faced.
Now that a major war between the two nations has erupted, we’re about to find out exactly how high the cost of that negligence will be. And the “Pompeo Plot” should serve as a haunting prologue.
The road to this moment began in 2018.
When President Trump withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal, many career DHS officials watched with growing apprehension. It was my second year in the Trump administration, and I remember hearing from them directly. A veteran counterterrorism official showed up outside my office the week Trump pulled out from the deal. He knew the region like the back of his hand.
“Are we going to war?” he asked bluntly.
“I wouldn’t know,” I told him. “We’re not involved.”
“What? If we hit them, DHS is the one playing defense. Immediately.”
“You’re preaching to the choir.”
Despite the profound implications for domestic security, the White House had seemingly cut DHS out of key conversations on Iran. Donald Trump didn’t like to hear “no,” and more often than not, the Department was the one to pump the breaks when it looked like a Trump foreign policy decision would put Americans in harms way. By the time the president began toying with a more confrontational posture toward Iran, DHS officials were already being kept at arm’s length.
So I did an informal survey of experts to assess the consequences here at home if we went to war with Iran.
The findings were grim. While I cannot speak to the official internal assessments of DHS at the time, the external consensus from think-tank analysts was clear: a U.S. move toward regime change would trigger a prolonged Iranian campaign of revenge. The experts warned that Iran would not seek a conventional victory, nor could it achieve one when matched against the United States. But its forces would launch a long-term campaign of asymmetric warfare to get back at America. We would need to be ready. Very, very ready.
Experts spelled out the possibilities. The regime’s operatives might launch devastating cyber strikes on American power grids or financial systems. They could activate “sleeper cells” to kidnap U.S. citizens on Spring Break in Europe or recruit terrorist proxies to mount attacks inside the United States. Prophetically, more than one analyst predicated that the regime would deploy operatives to assassinate American officials as an act of retaliation.
For those reasons, many at DHS were opposed to a sudden war with Iran. Those fears were shared across party lines and administrations. Trump didn’t care.
The 2020 strike on Soleimani was the ultimate stress test for these theories.
During the final year of Trump’s first term, he decided to act on intelligence to kill General Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The General was a brutal architect of regional instability — a man with the blood of hundreds of American soldiers on his hands, whom he targeted during the Iraq war. Though his killing was a tactical victory, it invited a strategic nightmare.
In the wake of his death, Iran did not back down. It seemed to double down on plots against the United States. That included an assassination attempt against Donald Trump himself, against senior cabinet members, and against U.S.-Iranian dissidents. The Pompeo plot in 2022 was not an outlier. It was proof the Iranians were getting closer to their goal, and it showed that the regime could reach across oceans to touch the highest levels of the American government.
To be clear, I have no love for the Ayatollah, the Iranian leader who is now dead in the wake of Trump’s most recent strikes. No one can deny that Iran remains a top threat to American interests. We — and the people of Iran — would all be better off if the country was free. But going into a full-scale conflict without a robust, transparent strategy for homeland defense is a grievous mistake.
With President Trump now escalating to “major combat operations,” we are entering a war for which the American people are fundamentally unprepared. The administration’s focus remains on the “big swing” abroad, while the vulnerabilities at home — our digital infrastructure, our soft targets, and our public officials — remain largely exposed to a regime that has spent the last six years practicing its revenge.
The warnings we raised years ago were not put forward by worry warts. They were a roadmap of the danger we now face. I can’t tell you whether Donald Trump consulted DHS before this weekend’s attack. But his obvious dismissal of our concerns during his first term are a good indicator of how much he thought about them this time. I don’t see that we are any more prepared than we were before. In fact, I see an administration far more focused on deporting Somalis than defending against terrorist attacks, cyber attacks, and foreign sabotage.
To put it another way, Donald Trump has not just started a new war in the Middle East. He has invited one to our front door.
Your friend, in defiance,
Miles Taylor
Trump and Kegseth are not known for their strategic abilities or their abilities to anticipate obstacles. Killing the current leadership of Iran doesn’t guarantee regime change will take place. In addition, bombing tends to stiffen support for the existing government and to create additional antagonism toward the people doing the bombing.
Trump’s failure to strengthen homeland defense simply compounds the problems we can expect to face as a result of bombing Iran. I don’t like Iran’s authoritarian government or military, but we can expect Iran’s government to retaliate by attacking our foreign bases or causing a domestic attack. This is another example of Trump being able to do something and to do it regardless of the probable negative consequences.
The Epstein War may start as "conventional," but won't end that way, if at all.